The Bird of Night

Author	Beryl Bainbridge
ISBN	0786704675

The story of the maiden voyage of the Titanic is a familiar one, but Bainbridge still managed an impressively fresh reimagination of the personal experiences of a rich young Anglo-American who has been adopted by the family of J.P. Morgan. His journey is somewhat picaresque - he spends most of the voyage...

Author

Joan Brady

"[A] vivid historical novel--part poignant biographical fiction, part raw frontier epic."
TIME
Taking flight from an extraordinary real-life family history, here is a riveting novel of how the past lives on, generation after generation. THEORY OF WAR is the richly imagined story of one...

Author	Jennifer Johnston
ISBN	0140106987

4★
This begins as a light-hearted, affectionate look at a young girl growing up in Ireland in 1920, after the end of WW1, but her childish, secret adventure turns serious and shows the dark divisions in Ireland.

Nancy was orphaned very young and has been raised in a friendly, loving household...

Author	Paul Theroux
ISBN	0140050728

World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant...

Author	William McIlvanney
ISBN	0340407573

His face made a fist at the world. The twined remnant of umbilicus projected vulnerably. Hands, feet and prick. He had come equipped for the job.

Newborn Conn Docherty, raw as a fresh wound, lies between his parents in their tenement room, with no birthright but a life's labour in the pits of his...

Author	Brian O'Doherty
ISBN	1885983395

In a London pub in the 1950s, editor William Maginn is intrigued by a reference to the reputedly shameful demise of a remote mountain village in Kerry, Ireland, where he was born. Maginn returns to Kerry and uncovers an astonishing tale: both the account of the destruction of a place and a way of life which...

Author	John Fuller
ISBN	0907540279

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Flying to Nowhere is a modern Gothic novel with spiritual overtones that open out a set of classic novelistic quests. Set on a remote Welsh island during the Middle Ages, the tale is woven around two main characters&emdash;Vane, an emissary sent...

Author	Paul Sayer
ISBN	0340508043

(Winner of the 1988 Whitbread Award, The Comforts of Madness is narrated by a catatonic who never speaks. To the rest of the world he is an inert body and is subjected to a variety of experiments, but his own consciousness is vital and reflective. This novel draws attention to the fact that we can never really...

Author	Patrick White
ISBN	0670747394

Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him-all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom...

Author	Andrew O'Hagan
ISBN	0771068352

First Canadian publication of the powerful debut novel from the author of Be Near Me.

Finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Whitbread Award.

Hugh Bawn was a modern hero, a visionary urban planner, a man of the people who revolutionized...

Author	Alice Thomas Ellis
ISBN	0140067043

My 2nd foray into AT Ellis's world. Not wholly satisfying. . .

Valentine is my favorite - unflappable and sure in her belief, an infinity symbol of philosophical circularity that assures salvation (and makes a pretty cute bracelet if so bended metallically around a wrist).

The other...

Author	William Trevor
ISBN	0140107487

This is another very quirky book from the 1970 Booker shortlist - another book with comic elements and a dark human story at its centre, which is clearly something the judges that year liked, as both the winner The Elected Member and Eva Trout have similarities.

The setting for this one is O'Neill's...

Author	Michèle Roberts
ISBN	1853816000

Man Booker Prize Nominee (1992)

Booker Prize Finalist, Daughters of the House is Michèle Roberts' acclaimed novel of secrets and lies revealed in the aftermath of World War II. Thérèse and Leonie, French and English cousins of the same age, grow up together in Normandy. Intrigued by parents'...

Author	Jan Morris
ISBN	0394532627

Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism...

Author	Shena Mackay
ISBN	0749394064

When Percy and Betty Harlency abandon their seedy Streatham pub, for the Copper Kettle Tearoom in Kent, life for their daughter April changes dramatically. She is befriended by the wonderfully dangerous Ruby, whose red hair and brutal home life emphasise her love of fire, and by the immaculately dressed...

Author

Brian Moore

Somewhere in an unnamed Eastern bloc country, someone is out to silence Cardinal Bern. Is it the Secret Police, or is it - more shockingly - fanatical Catholic activists who believe that Bern, by keeping the peace between Church and State, has finally compromised himself too far?

Narrowly...

Author	Thomas Keneally
ISBN	0340431040

In November 1918, in a railway carriage in a forest near Paris, six men meet to negotiate an end to the terrible slaughter of the First World War. Threatened by famine and anarchy at home, the Germans struggle to mitigate the punishing terms offered by the Allies. But both sides are torn by battle exhaustion...

Author	Kingsley Amis
ISBN	0140050965

One reads Jake's Thing now in a mood of embarrassed depression: embarrassed by the details we're given of a failing middle-aged libido and the efforts undergone to fix it, and depressed by the general context of 1970s suburban England, which here seems desperately poky and insular – a succession...

Author	Iris Murdoch
ISBN	0140031766

  An old man struggles to make one last connection with his estranged son, before it’s too late   The elderly Bruno knows he is not far from death. One of his last wishes is to contact his estranged son, Miles, whose marriage to an Indian woman drove a decades-long wedge between father and son. When Miles...

Author	Sybille Bedford
ISBN	1582431434

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Sybille Bedford's latest novel walks the borderline between autobiography and fiction. It picks up where A Legacy leaves off, leading us from the Kaiser's Germany into the wider Europe of the 1920s and the limbo between world wars. The narrator, Billi, tells the story...

Author	Derek Robinson
ISBN	1845291727

World War One aviators were more than just soldiers they were the knights of the sky, and the press and public idolised the gallant young heroes. But for Stanley Woolley, commanding officer of Goshawk Squadron, the romance of chivalry in the clouds is just a myth. There are two types of men up there: victims...

Author	Muriel Spark
ISBN	0811212467

Spark chooses Rome, "the motherland of sensation," for the setting of her story about movie star Annabel Christopher (known to her adoring fans as "The English Lady-Tiger"), who has made the fatal mistake of believing in her public image. This error and her embittered husband, and unsuccessful actor,...